was away from Paris when the poet was buried, leading to some grumbling among Baudelaire’s friends.8 The “Notice” serves as a belated substitute for this missed opportunity for appreciation. It is at once eulogy and critical study, and performs the important work of framing Baudelaire as a decadent writer, piecing together elements of his work and reversing traditional critical judgments to make decadence available as a purposive literary stance rather than a terminal condition. Gautier’s crucial innovation is to define Baudelaire as a loyalist, a warrior for the poetic ideal, who experienced the extremes of literary life not only out of devotion to his craft but also in the service of an emerging dissident community. In this regard, Gautier, not Baudelaire, is the John the Baptist of the decadent movement; and like the Baptist, his most recognizable gesture is pointing to the true messiah, the sacrificial lamb of the decadent communion. Baudelaire’s sacrificial rhetoric echoes throughout the piece, though with a significantly redirected political thrust.
Although the “Notice” seems on a first reading to be rather diffuse, personal, and rambling, it alludes with surprising rigor to the Athenian epideictic genre of the funeral oration, which, as Nicole Loraux notes in The Invention of Athens, was undergoing an important revival in the political rhetoric of the nineteenth century. The funeral oration is defined by the praise of patriotic sacrifice, and scholars and politicians of many stripes laid claim in the period to the republican lineage of idealized citizenship the genre both lauds and epitomizes.9 Gautier uses the familiar topoi of the funeral oration to treat Baudelaire’s life and work as a form of sacrifice, but he systematically overturns the expectations of the genre. For Gautier, Baudelaire’s sacrifice is literary, not military. He presents Baudelaire as a classically stoic warrior, whose fascination with death and sacrifice becomes a form of political critique that places the poet at the head of society. Baudelaire is a figure of internal exile, a critical witness to modernity, who fulfills the vision of outsider sociality he himself had discerned in Poe’s sad fate, and maintains in his artistic practice the civic virtues that have fallen into decay in the larger society. Drawing on the canonically republican tradition of the funeral oration, Gautier memorializes a community of outsiders and exceptions. This society is not the Athenian polis of the Periclean idiom but the bohemian counterculture, composed of the very figures Baudelaire identified as ill at ease in the nineteenth century: artists, dandies, writers, lovers, ragmen, and so forth. They form a polity apart—a decadent republic of letters—devoted at once to pleasure and to self-preservation.
Gautier’s idiosyncratic allusions to the funeral oration underlie the most significant rhetorical choices in the “Notice.” Although the piece was published more than six months after Baudelaire’s death, appeared serially before it was printed as the preface to Baudelaire’s collection, and is far too long to have been composed in one sitting, Gautier dates it 20 February 1868, lending it an oratorical air. Rather than recording the day of composition or completion, the date stresses the occasional nature of the “Notice,” and its implicit address to a community. Gautier strays most notably from the model of the funeral oration, which always praised the dead as a group, in his focus on a single individual. In other respects, he sticks closely to the conventions of the genre: the piece enumerates the poet’s major achievements, casts his death as a sacrifice for the community, and toward its conclusion seeks to console those left behind: “It is sorrowful, for the survivors, to see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away, to lose in a more and more deserted path of life a companion of youth” (F 164; E 86). He slyly plays on the traditional oratorical promise of the city to care for war orphans by closing his essay with a discussion of the prose poems, Baudelaire’s orphan texts, which were first collected in the same complete works edition for which the “Notice” was commissioned. The only prose poem Gautier discusses at any length, “Les Bienfaits de la lune [The Moon’s Favors],” tells of a sleeping child visited at night by the moon, as if by “a mother’s careful tenderness,” and brought under its influence.10 The moon becomes a foster parent, much like the city in ancient Athens.
Gautier also follows the form of the funeral oration by defining Baudelaire’s artistic achievement in terms of violence and sacrifice. The essay lingers on images of death and loss, reading the themes of Baudelaire’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s warrior spirit. Gautier’s description of Baudelaire as a young man is especially telling. With black hair and prominent white brow, his head resembles a “Saracen helmet” (F 113–14; E 2–3). This idiosyncratic martial trait foreshadows Baudelaire’s destiny. The literary life is a kind of violence done to self and others in pursuit of beauty, a “sad, precarious, and miserable” existence, made up of bloody “battles [luttes]” to achieve an ideal from which most writers never return intact; in effect, the writer “no longer lives” (F 121; E 13). Even successful poets die as martyrs, “crowned with glory” and sinking into the “breast of their ideal” (F 121; E 14). When Gautier describes Baudelaire’s appearance as a mature man—the poet wore only black after 1851, as I noted in the last chapter—the warrior becomes a kind of saint, reinforcing the connection between poetry and martyrdom. His hair is now white, and his face “thin and spiritualized.” His lips “were closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical secrets”; he has overall “an almost sacerdotal appearance” (F 120; E 12).
Gautier’s comparison of writing and warfare is not wholly fanciful. Although the essay does not explicitly mention the Revolutions of 1848, the event shadows its account of Baudelaire’s legend. Here again, the use of dates in the essay is significant. Gautier claims that he first met Baudelaire in 1849, when the latter was still unpublished and obscure, though clearly marked for greatness. This chronology is almost certainly incorrect: by 1849, Baudelaire had published two Salons, several critical articles, Le Fanfarlo, his first Poe translation, and numerous individual poems. His talent, if not his lasting fame, was well established, at least in the literary circles Gautier frequented, where the various pseudonyms under which Baudelaire published his early works would not have been a mystery. It is more likely that Gautier first met Baudelaire in 1845.11 Gautier’s apparent error in dating is best understood not as a mistake but as a creative elaboration, which traces Baudelaire’s influence on his generation to the Revolution of 1848 and its chaotic aftermath: the fleeting establishment of the Second Republic and the conservative counterrevolution that culminated in Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. Gautier does not mention Baudelaire’s revolutionary activity—he surely knew of it— but it is suggested throughout the “Notice” in his characterization of the poet’s work and influence. Writing during the waning days of the Second Empire, Gautier reads Baudelaire’s poetry as an anticipatory response to the disorder that Louis Napoleon sought to contain with the virtual police state he instituted soon after assuming power. Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican virtue in an age of political chaos who documents the underbelly of a decadent modern empire.
Gautier’s famous definition of decadent style should be read in the light of this historical context. Decadence, as Gautier describes it, is a self-conscious stance, which historicizes decay rather than celebrating it. Baudelaire challenges the nineteenth-century’s claims of progress by challenging its choice of historical analogies.12 Praising Baudelaire in the language of the classical funeral oration, Gautier appropriates the republican imaginary of classical Athens and the Roman Republic for the modern poet; the Second Empire with its social controls and displays of wealth and power resembles the decadent Roman Empire. Gautier discerns in Baudelaire a taste for social fragmentation and political disorder, and this taste allows him to document the aftermath of 1848 in ways unavailable to other writers:
The poet of Les Fleurs du mal loved what is inaccurately called the style of decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme maturity induced by the slanting suns of civilizations that have grown old. It is an ingenious style, complicated, wise, full of nuances and research, always pushing back the frontiers of speech [reculant … les bornes de la langue], taking color from every palette, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, confessions of senile passions becoming depraved and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of decadence is the last
